Comments on Do It, Ed

I would favor this, if it would provide a mechanism to weed out the Naderites who keep finding their way onto the school board, like Sally Soriano and Brita (sorry, I mean "Brita!") Butler-Wall. It's never comforting to consider that some of the same people who are now responsible for my niece's education were, back in 2000, brain-dead enough to think that supporting a third-party candidate in a presidential election was a relatively safe thing to do. As 3000 dead US soldiers (and countless Iraqis) can now attest, ideas do have consequences. And these particular individuals and their ideas have no business anywhere near our school system.

So let's hear it, Seattle legislators: Do you support Ed Murray's idea or not? Chopp? Pedersen? etc?

It'll never happen. We're too addicted to extreme democracy around here. We don't have ballots, we have electoral novellas.

I doubt that letting the mayor appoint the school board will make much difference.

1) The mayor's electability is a function of many factors: his performance on an entire range of issues, and the quality of his opponents. The connection between voter satisfaction on one issue and his reelection is too indirect to provide enough accountability to matter. (Think Ron Sims and the elections office. Did Sims get reelected because of, or in spite of, how well perceived on this one issue?)

2) The school board only has so much influence over the school system in the first place. Work rules are largely determined by state law. Union contracts and civil service protections make it nearly impossible to hold teachers and administrators accountable for their own performance.

The only accountability that really matters is making schools more accountable to the parents of students. Ed Murray's proposal is just another episode of a politician wanking himself in public.

don't voters elect the mayor? I am confused

apparently Dan thinks people only act to make money

I support part appointed and part elected, and a good shakeup .... and by the way, the state has abdicated the $$$$$ they are supposed to give to fully fund education

oh, that little problem

a decreasing number of students, simple math, don't need such a vast system

good luck Ed, and Dan, no one who has a clue would mate you to a school board

I think this is actually a really interesting issue. Can someone paraphrase the school board's failures in some sort of quantitative way?

I'm not baiting, I'd like to know more about how this works in Seattle, and what the perception of how (in what way) schools are doing poorly is.

Or you could pay the School Board enough that talented people would run. And give them independent staff so that they wouldn't have to rely on the bureaucracy for information.

That would take more than 5 seconds to explain 'tho, wouldn't it?

But "accountability to parents" is what got us into this mess. Parents don't know shit about schools.

Umm...Dan...the Mayor has been bitching left and right about the schools. All. The. Time. and gets criticized by the board, parents, superintendent, janitors...etc. AND KEEPS GOING ANYWAY. Try that google thing the kids seem to like before you go off all nutty and blame one of those trying to do something.

Maybe the mayor can actually get some qualified and decisive people on the board, rather than our current crop of administrators who are too afraid of parents to do anything.

As far as union blaming goes, the best school system in the world, currently in Finland, also has teacher unions and civil service protections. Finnish political leaders credit their '"unified" school system, which sees children staying at the same school between the ages of seven and 16, rather than having primary and secondary schools...', their emphasis on investing in education "which has created a system where as much as possible is delivered to students without charge...School meals are free to all pupils, there are no university fees and students can stay in the upper secondary stage...for up to four years...", and Finland's "strong culture of reading in the home...Parents nurture a love of reading among children and this is supported by a network of public libraries... Finland's 15 year olds were judged to have the highest standards of literacy in the world."

Finnish kids also start school later and spend less hours in school than American kids.

Fnarf -- Where do you send your own kids to school?

Oh, I guess I'm up to speed on the basics:

http://www.seattlechannel.org/issues/seattlePublicSchools.asp

Plus, Finnish kids dress cool:
http://www.hel-looks.com/

Question for the Stranger--I thought the new editorial policy was, "if the mayor is for it, we are agin' it"

How does Dan's idea fit with that?

As for you Stefan, I have kids in the public schools, do you? When you say that the schools need more accountability to parents it leads me to believe you don't. As a former teacher I can tell you, one of the biggest problem with schools today is the disconnect between too busy parents and the expectations of what school should provide for them. Most parents have to work, sometimes two jobs, just to put food on the table. They have little time to help educate their own kids. So they expect more and more of the schools. Yet very few are invested in making their neighborhood school a better place. They just shop for a different school.

Your party advocates defunding schools and more but you take no personal responsiblility for making them a better place. Give me a break.

As a parent of a kid entering kindergarten next year, I couldn't agree more. Go, Eddie, go!

Seattle public schools need a shakeup if they are going to attract any kids other than those who can not afford private school.

Stefan, I don't have any kids, but if I did, they'd go to public schools like I did. I think it ought to be illegal to send your kids to private school, and I think that rich (or not) white (or not) people sending their kids to private schools is in fact the #1 reason why public schools suck so hard.

I also think that 95% of what goes on in schools is either unhelpful or actively harmful to the little shits.

I have to agree - parents (and fiefdom building principals and chickenshit administrators) are ruining schools - and not just in Seattle.

Fucking baby boomers.

1. Sure, the Seattle School Board needs a shake up, but what it really needs, more than anything else, is more money. Good public education costs money, and Seattle, and WA in general, is grossly underfunding their schools. They cut programs left and right to save money, but they still can't afford to hire enough teachers. The last time I checked, Seattle was short over 200 teachers. For good education, you need good teachers, and lots of them (for smaller class sizes). The only way you are going to get that is to dramatically increase teacher salaries, and come up with enough money to hire way more of them than we have now. Too many people give lip service to wanting better education, but when it comes right down to it, they're not willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Being a teacher is hard work. It requires 5-6 years of college. Yet the pay for a public school teacher is less than what waiters at any decent restaurant make. Their peak career salary is less than I can make part time with my eyes closed. Attrition for teachers is sky high (big surprise). It is the lowest paying profession that requires an education beyond a BA degree. You are not going to get more and better teachers, and retain them, unless you pay them significantly more than you do now.

2. 90% of the demands from the Repugs for more "accountability" and "efficiency" is bullshit. It is a smoke screen. And for a lot of them, it is a racist smoke screen. Many minorities know this, but many whites are completely oblivious. Rich white Republicans send their precious offspring to private schools. Since they spend their money sending their offspring to private schools, they'd really rather not pay any more tax money than minimally required to educate those poor brown kids. Similarly, right wing wackos send their kids to Xtian schools, and they don't want to spend their tax money educating godless heathens, and supporting the evil secular humanists and all that.

Of course the racists don't want to publicly sound like racists, and the religious wackos don't want to sound like raving lunatics. Both form a grudging cabal. They coach their language in code. In their cold little hearts, they'd like nothing more than to eliminate public education entirely. They know that is an impossible goal, but they can--and they have for 20 years--chip away at public education, slowly bleeding off its funding, reducing its effectiveness, tying it up in knots.

We've got a Democratically controlled house, senate, and governor, and a budget surplus. If you double teacher salaries and hire 200 more teachers, 90% of the problems go away in a year.

"The chance that you will get elected to some other position—perhaps a paying one—after a stint on the school board? Nonexistent."

Wasn't Patty Murray first elected to the board of the Shoreline School District? She jumped from there to the Washington State Senate and then to the United States Senate. Perhaps more an exception to the rule, but a significant exception nonetheless.

During the hearing for school board closures a professor at SCCC, Mr. Livingstone, promised constant sit-in's by him and his followers if they went thorough. Since they have time to harass the hell of the school board no doubt they have time to BE the school board. Let them be held responsible instead of the perenial protestors. Let them deal with the abuse that the current school board did. It's amazing that those who always know what other people should be doing for them are too fucking lazy to step up to bat.

Class size is a red herring. In Japan, class sizes are anywhere from 60-100 per teacher, and their kids beat the hell out of ours academically. The way they do it? Discipline and responsibility. Each row has a leader responsible for the students in his row. The other difference? Kids there actually want to learn. They internalize the knowledge that their level of education will determine their economic status from a very young age. It's the difference between high school and college. High school kids are belligerant and generally unmotivated because they don't want to be there; they have to. In college, not only do you want to be there, you're paying through the nose to be there, and the students who stick around for more than one or two quarters attend class, pay attention, and work hard, again having internalized the truth that their economic status will depend on getting a degree.

The Stranger rarely writes about school board issues, and seems totally uninformed and without standing to call for the effective dissolution of the board. King county government, the Seattle school board, and the port of Seattle might as well not exist to the stranger's news department, except for maybe gay rights and transit issues.

As for the idea that Nickels will appoint talented candidates with the experience necessary to oversee the Seattle schools, that flies in the face of 5 years of "plum assignments for the politically ambitious" going to his inexperienced campaign staff. Norm Rice doesn't count as thinking outside the box-- that was the man who helped ensure that Greg Nickels would never have to have a real job again, after all. It's all political patronage, which is not the same as leadership.

I'm with the other commentors: the school board is eating itself up not because of too much democracy, but because a democratically elected school board would never enact the kind of budget cuts that higher ups are demanding. They want the state to resume its funding commitments from the past, or some kind of better taxing authority. They'll get neither. And then they'll be blamed for the cost-cutting that follows them when they're either swept out of office or replaced by some kind of anti-democratic group of technocrats preaching the gospel of efficiency.

For those of you dumping on parents, parental involvement is absolutely the key to a good school and a good education. I think you're reacting to the actions of some parents who are terrified of losing their neighborhood schools - a totally understandable fear when you don't know if your little kid is going to be put on a bus that takes an hour to go 2 miles twice each and every day. It's hard to sit still when you're 7.

But without parents and their absurdly epic classroom volunteering, fundraising, tutoring, coaching and blah blah ad nauseum, you will have schools that are both halt AND lame.

As a matter of fact, the two things we haven't caught on to are women's lib and the radical right defunding of public education over the last 20+ years. That's right - we used to be able to pay great teachers crappy wages because they were...women! And now that smart, capable women are no longer a cheap labor pool, we're left with a lot of teachers with not much experience, plenty of mediocrity and a handful of passionate, committed teachers who work 60+ hours a week for inadequate compensation in a profession whose pinnacle is that that kid you loved when they came through your class in '85 might show up to visit 20 years later, because there are no golden parachutes here.

So yes, the school board is embarrassing to all of us. Yes, the school closure process was a fiasco. Yes, the best programs are underfunded (would John Stanford have parents willing to cheat to get in if foreign language were a requirement in every elementary school, like it SHOULD be?). Yes, there's a serious disconnect between accountability and responsibility. And yes, we need to pay market rate for what we used to get for cheap or free.

Jtroop's point about paying women shitty wages is pretty accurate. However, I gotta say that my grandpa was a teacher in public schools from the day he left college in 1922, and he made enough to raise a family OK. But schools were different then.

In the "good old days" dumb kids didn't go to school; they left at 14, or earlier. Black kids left even earlier. College prep was something that affected only a tiny percentage of students, far, far less than today. Physically disabled kids never went to school at all, and kids with learning disabilities left early (see "dumb" above). Even fifty years ago, high school was something lots and lots of people (half?) never made it to, let alone college. Much of the problems of schools today stem from the modern idea that everybody should get an education.

It's also a bit of a myth that the Japanese (or Finns, or whatever your favorite school-attending nationality is) are dramatically better than us. They do better at certain kinds of tests, because they have those tests drilled into them by rote (a technique well-suited to large classes). A lot of highly-educated Japanese engineering students come out of their schooling lacking the very basic creative skills they need in real-world workplaces -- and even engineering is primarily a creative enterprise. Japanese cars are DESIGNED by Americans. Designers get paid more than assembly workers. And the literature on other countries' schools is filled with consternation that our "dumb" students, who don't have the slightest clue where Iowa is, let alone Iraq, are so productive in the economy.

So I'm pretty skeptical of claims that the solution to our educational woes is to line 'em up in rows of ten by ten for sixteen hours a day, and hammer away at the WASL. Art and music and drama and just plain fooling around with stuff is pretty important to; maybe more important. Most of the facts you learn in school are either lies or irrelevant or both, anyways.

Even sports matter. I say that as I remember with extreme clarity how much I hated any kind of phys ed when I was in school, with an intensity that even now is making the light in this room strobe a little. But I now know that being able to work as a team with other people you fucking hate is extremely important, and being able to get work out of people like me, who hate the fucking game they are playing, is the key task of management. Sports taught me how to do that.

The constant hand-wringing over the schools is caused by parents who are confused about what their role is. If the parents who got up in the meetings would spend their energy instead in filling up their houses, and their lives, with books (and art, and music, and possibly hand-scribbled notes on Edgar Martinez's lifetime batting statistics), instead of creating a pointless disturbance based on imaginary grievances, the schools would be better. And the school board would be better, because you'd attract people with functioning brains, instead of just superhuman levels of tolerance for bad and meddlesome behavior. No one with a clue has any interest in even attending a school board meeting one time, let alone serving on the goddamn thing.

In Germany, the adademically inclined kids go to Gymnasium (aka college prep highschool), and the rest go to Realschule until age 16, where they learn practical skills that might actually earn them some money someday. The theory is that some kids benefit more from auto-mechanics and small business accounting than Shakespeare and Calculus. I think they might be on to something.

Germany can get away with this because it's racially homogenous, whereas here in America, such a system would quickly be denounced as "systematic racism".

WF's post is dead-on.

This idea is as dumb as dirt, will have 1,000,001 unintended consequences, and will increase rather than decrease the level of cronyism and incompetence of the political creatures who inhabit our school boards.

Oh, by the way - it's profoundly undemocratic, too. Coming from the increasingly authoritarian Stranger editorial slant, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

...and I forgot to mention that many of the people who started this whispering campaign are Business Roundtable/Downtown Cabal/Corporate Seattle types who are using it as a stalking horse for Charter Schools and other privatization initiatives. The Stranger ought to think twice about who you're getting into bed with on this issue (besides Nickels, should have been repulsive enough anyway).

Patty Murray went from Shoreline School Board to Senate. So I don't think that post's premise is 100% accurate.

What is rather amusing about this whole debate is how well the current Seattle School Board has deflected the criticisms leveled against it. The former mayor (and long time mentor to the current mayor) Norm Rice was immediately shot down by the school board members as Manhas' replacement for superindentendent. Both Rice and Nickels have gone silent regarding Seattle Public Schools since this humiliation.

So now Murray says his consitiuents are tired of dealing with the Seattle School "crisis". Just how many of Murray's constiuents is Murray talking about? I don't hear the same call coming from Ken Jacobsen's or other state rep's districts. Why? Their constituents with children attending Seattle Public Schools is likely greater than Murray's.

Perhaps Mr. Murray's time and efforts would be better spent benefiting the needs of Seattle Public Schools by addressing why he and the rest of the legislature have continually been unable to properly address the state's funding shortfalls towards public education.

---Jensen

If we had a strong mayor (like Chicago or NY) I'd say lets make the school board an appointed board. Problem is that we don't have a strong mayor (and haven't had) and what you'll see if the school board gets changed in that fashion is a lot of time spent on that by City Council and the Mayor (through squabbling) and neglect of other things of importance within the city. I'm not convinced it's worth it.

what a bunch of interesting posts -- mayor's too strong and dictatorial. mayor is not strong enough.

and then there are the teachers arguing that the state has abdicated its responsibility. yes, indeed. the state has abdicated its responsibility to fund education. but throwing more money at the mess we have in the school district is not going to solve anything.

i'm glad the stranger is commenting on this issue. it's high time and this is a good debate to have.

but it is interesting to note that dan savage doesn't send his own kid to seattle public school...

"but it is interesting to note that dan savage doesn't send his own kid to seattle public school..."

Careful, now he's gonna get all mean and defensive because you've pointed out his glaring hypocrisy...